Tempest in a Tampa teapot

This "article" doesn't even get past the title ("Assault rifles: Dangerous , deadly and on our streets") without serious accuracy problems--assault rifles, which have a fully automatic fire capability, have been extremely heavily regulated for many decades. I assume the Tammie Fields (the author) meant "assault weapons"--a term made up by the Victim Producing Center's Josh Sugarmann--made up specifically to capitalize on the ignorance of people like Tammie, and their propensity for confusing semi-automatic firearms with fully automatic ones.

She starts with a reference to the famous North Hollywood Bank shootout of 1997.

Tampa – Who can forget the fierce shootout between police and two heavily armed men decked out in protective armor? It wasn't a movie the nation was watching. It was real back in February of 1997 in North Hollywood, California.

Police closed in on the suspects after they robbed a bank. It would become the most violent shootout in police history revealing that the bad guys are arming themselves most times better than police.

"Most times?" How does one incident reveal anything about what happens "most times"? For that matter, does the fact that she had to go ten years in the past to find her illustrative case not indicate that it was an extremely unusual event?

Next, she does her best to tie that bit of history in with current events.

Then fast forward to this week in Tampa. Local police say Antwan Gould and Derrick Howie, convicted felons, not only sold undercover officers cocaine at the Brittany Apartment complex on Dale Mabry but when officers arrested the two they found a high powered assault rifle in the back seat of their car.

The trouble is that the "high powered assault rifle" was an SKS--neither "high powered" (the 7.62x39mm round is a good deal less powerful than popular deer hunting calibers like the .30-06, .270 Winchester, etc.), nor an "assault rifle" (it has no fully automatic fire capability--in fact, by most definitions of "assault weapon," it is not even one of those).

Perhaps the police officers will clear up Tammie's confusion . . . nope:

According to detectives Gould and Howie were armed with an SKS assault rifle. It was fully loaded with enough power to send a bullet slicing through a car door according to the undercover officer. "It's a military round. So chances are the vest we wear on a day to day basis would not have helped us a whole lot with that round."

Enough power to send a bullet through sheet metal? The horror! Also, the fact that it's a "military round" has nothing to do with the inability of soft body armor (the kind worn by most police officers--and even that sounds kind of unlikely for undercover officers) to stop it--that would be the case with just about any centerfire rifle round.

Tammie should stop worrying about "assault rifles" on Tampa's streets, and start worrying about her lack of knowledge of the subjects she covers.